Features

In January of 2009, the Los Alamos Public Schools (LAPS) will hold a bond election. For the first time in a decade, the school district staff is asking voters to consider an increase in the mill rate. This increase in taxes to property owners will fund renovations to aging school facilities.

By going to the upcoming Family YMCA Kathak and Bharatanatyam dance recital, the audience will be able to do more than see types of Indian dance; they will have the chance to make a difference in another country across the world.

Jan McDonald has been a fixture in the Los Alamos music scene. Whether conducting the Los Alamos High School band or performing with the Los Alamos Big Band, McDonald has shared his music with the community for a long time.

He will return to town, along with the Dalton Trio, at 7 p.m. Friday at Fuller Lodge for “An Evening of Jazz.”

The concert will feature jazz selections such as “Georgia on My Mind,” “Body and the Soul,” “Alone Together” and “Black Orpheus.”

“(There’s a) desire inside each and every one of us to have a hero,” Dan Rosencrans, station manager of Family Line Radio, said Friday night during the Hope Pregnancy Center’s 13th annual banquet at the White Rock Baptist Church.

The opportunity for each member of the community to fulfill this desire has arrived. Through the banquet, the Hope Pregnancy Center staff set out packets and pledge cards, asking the community to support the center in its efforts to help women and teens in the community.

Of whom does Reformation remind you: Thomas Beza? Ulrich Zwingli? James Arminius? John Calvin? Probably all the above. The “Father of the Reformation,” Martin Luther, named after St. Martin of Tours, was very inquisitive and wanted to learn from the sages such as Aristotle, Plato, and Gabriel Biel. But two men who became his tutors (Bartholomaus Arnoldi von Usingen and Jodocus Trutfetter) taught Luther to be wary of even the great thinkers of the ages.

There are sites and activities that are deemed unique to Los Alamos and embraced by locals. But now, it is more than just Los Alamos residents who are noticing these local gifts.

In fact, the New Mexico Recreation and Parks Association presented awards to the Los Alamos Recreation Division and the Parks Division during its annual conference in September.

The recreation division received the Aquatic Program of the Year award for its Pumpkin Splash activity while the parks division earned the Park/Trails/Bike Path award for its design and master plan for Camp May.

There is art in nature – a setting and rising sun, a blooming flower, a floating cloud. In fact, art is all around us.

Sometimes artists take matters into their own hands to show people just how artistic nature can be. The natural world becomes the artist’s canvas to create an image. Robert Smithson shaped rocks into the “Spiral Jetty” in the Great Salt Lake, while Christo and Jeanne Claude have draped cloth material on various structures including a valley in Rifle, Colo., and islands off of Florida.

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet we hear the memorable lines, “A plague on both your houses!” The exhibition at the Art Center that opens Friday, with a reception from 5-7 p.m., is anything but a plague. The exhibit is a celebration of not only the house but the home as well.

I always thought break-dancing was just a quick trend, locked up tight in the 80s’ and only performed by odd balls wearing really bad outfits.

Watching “Planet B-Boy” revealed just how wrong I was. The 80s just took an art form was ruined it by turning the art into commercialized tripe.

Break dancing, according to this documentary, has nothing to do with acid washed jeans and more to do with a free form of self-expression. There aren’t really any set moves or guidelines, it’s more about what a particular dancer feels and wants to express.

The famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle grew up in Indiana but moved with his wife to New Mexico in the 1940s, just before World War II started. They made their home in Albuquerque and even though Pyle traveled to provide first-hand accounts of the war, he would make trips to New Mexico.

Eventually, Pyle’s New Mexico home would be transformed into the Ernie Pyle Library, which is how Richard Melzer became introduced to this war correspondent.

“We’ve expanded our hours from 10 to 24 ee we’re also going to expand our office space in a new location (at the end of the month) to accommodate more clients,” executive director Sarah Taylor said. “We’ve hired a new client service administrator who oversees our in-house operation.”

But there is much more on the pregnancy center’s to-do list and to accomplish more, it needs the community’s help.

Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl would have been 41 years old Friday. But rather than brooding over Pearl’s murder by terrorists, the world is celebrating his life through music and Los Alamos is joining in the festivities.

The Los Alamos Community Winds, featuring Lesley Olsher, will host a concert at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Betty Ehart Senior Center.

In 1846, 500 members of the Mormon Battalion marched approximately 2,000 miles to fight in the Mexican-American War. Today, that journey is being taken again and the marchers will be arriving in Santa Fe Saturday. In recognition, there will be at Mormon Battalion Event Saturday at the Stake Center and Los Alamos residents are invited.

What constitutes a work of art? Should all art fit within the limits of whatever definition Webster’s Dictionary assigns the word or should it venture outside the lines in favor of multiple meanings?

Wandering through the newest exhibit at the Mesa Public Library, it seems clear that art defies a single definition. If something or someone is valued so highly and made immortal through paint, clay or any other medium, so in order that it can be shared with the rest of the world, then the work is worthy of the term art.